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• • December 9, 2010 at 5:34 pm #58055
    Kip

    Member

    I am currently making a book where the client wants to have a drop quote at the beginning of a chapter. However beginning of each chapter is a quote by someone and InDesign turns the quotes into the drop cap rather then the first letter of the sentence. The only work around I can think of to this is to put the opening quote make in a different text box and put that next to the drop cap. Is that the best way to go about this?

  • December 10, 2010 at 3:17 am #58058
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    You mean something like this

    

  • December 10, 2010 at 5:09 am #58059
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    Ingenious, indeed.

    The GREP style is applied automatically; only thing is you have to remember to manually set the number of characters for the Drop Cap to 2. Perhaps it's safest to create a separate paragraph style for this.

  • December 10, 2010 at 6:34 am #58060
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    Oh yes I forgot to include the other dialog screenshots – I hoped it was obvious. But wanted to clarify the end result before elaborating :)

  • December 10, 2010 at 6:38 am #58061
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    you also need to have a baseline shift and other things too. Be cool to see how others would tackle this too :)

  • December 10, 2010 at 6:46 am #58062
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Eugene, I think you're focusing on the formatting of the quote, rather than the original question, which is simpler: How to make both the quote mark and the first letter drop.

    @pik80: Fortunately, you can set the number of characters to drop to 2. You'd probably want to do this in the Drop Caps & Nested Styles pane of the paragraph styles dialog box, but you could also do it manually in the Control panel.

    In fact, if you subscribe to InDesign Magazine, you'll find an article about drop caps by the wonderful Nigel French in the issue coming out next week! He describes this very situation.

  • December 10, 2010 at 6:59 am #58063
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    David, to me it seems like they only want the first letter of the quote to be a drop cap, and not the actual quotation mark… perhaps I have read it wrongly?

  • December 10, 2010 at 1:03 pm #58067
    Alan Gilbertson

    Participant

    'Tis a bit ambiguous, Eugene. Meself, I'd be using a 2-character drop cap setting and turning on “Optical Margins” with a 'normous point size setting. After a few pints you'd never know the difference… :-)

  • December 10, 2010 at 4:26 pm #58071
    Kip

    Member

    @David Blatner

    Actually I was origionally thinking about only having the letter, not the quote, be the drop cap. Maybe having them both won't be such a bad idea though. I will look at it both ways and see which is better.

    @everyone

    I am out of the office today but I will take a look at what people have suggested I do when I get back on Monday.

  • December 13, 2010 at 10:09 am #58090
    Kip

    Member

    I have decided to just go ahead and make the quote mark a drop down as well. I was looking through a magazine the other day where I saw it used that way and it worked well. I never noticed that it was done that way before. I assumed that quote marks don't “drop down” like letters do so you wouldn't apply a drop cap style to the quote mark but I was wrong.

  • December 16, 2010 at 6:57 pm #58142
    Mr.Screens

    Member

    According to the Chicago Manual of Style, the open quote is often dropped when the design calls for a drop cap, and I think that this is by far the most attractive solution. CMS goes on to say that if the open quote is retained, it should appear at the same size and vertical alignment as the normal text, not be part of the larger drop cap style.

  • January 30, 2015 at 7:41 am #73021
    Michelle Bradley

    Member

    I currently use paragraph styles to add drop caps and nested styles, and while nested styles allows you to apply it through 1 letter, drop caps only allows you to apply it through characters or lines. When we have an initial quote, I want (usually) to hide the initial quote from the print version in InDesign and make the first letter a drop cap. I have figured out how to do this for stick-up caps with nested styles, but cannot find the appropriate workaround for using a drop cap, nor can I find a way of styling the drop cap without using that feature in the paragraph style. Below is the instructions I have thus far: do you know of a way to get drop caps through 1 letter instead of through 1 or 2 characters?
    1) In all paragraph styles you want to have no initial quote, go to the GREP Styles. In the To Text field, type ^” (which says find quote mark at beginning of paragraph).
    2) Make Apply Style hidden_character (or something to that effect), and style that Character Style as 0.1 pt (in Basic Character Formats), Horizontal Scale 10% (in Advanced Character Formats), Color: [None] (in Character Color).
    3) Apply any character style you want to “through 1 Letters” in Nested Styles. The Drop Cap option in Paragraph Styles will NOT work, as Drop Caps allow you to apply to Lines and Characters, but not Through 1 Letter. (If you do Characters in Drop Caps, you would need 1 for most paragraphs, and 2 for any paragraphs with the initial quote.)

  • January 30, 2015 at 10:03 am #73024
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    I like the grep styles trick.
    But if you want to make the quote disappear in the print version, but not in other versions, then I would suggest applying Conditional Text to it instead, and then turning that condition on/off, depending on output.

  • February 2, 2015 at 8:51 am #73056
    Michelle Bradley

    Member

    Thank you! I had not worked with Conditional Text, so that worked, except for the fact that I forgot to mention that my content is Locked: it comes in in InCopy and I don’t want to Check it Out if I don’t have to. I may be able to get this coded in to the InCopy file, but is there a way to label that Conditional Text as a subset of a Paragraph Style? Otherwise I will have to Check it Out and find each instance myself.

  • February 4, 2015 at 9:50 am #73127
    Michelle Bradley

    Member

    So I looked into this some more: Conditional Text cannot be worked with in InCopy, and I can’t find a way to get Character Styles to link to Conditional Text. In order to not check out the files, I thought I could just make a character style conditional text, and embed the character style nested in a paragraph style, but apparently those two don’t link. Am I missing something, or is there really no way to call a Character Style to use the Conditional Text feature?

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